Holding the Line
by kerrykhat
Summary: "I'm Doctor Martha Jones," she told the pale man in the black, gold, and green armor who had invaded UNIT. "Who the hell are you?"


**Disclaimer:** The BBC owns "Doctor Who" and all related characters; Marvel owns "The Avengers" and all related characters; I own nothing.  
**Notes:** This was written last October, after the first trailer for "The Avengers" came out.

* * *

_"You were made to be ruled."_

When the attack comes, UNIT is one of the first to be targeted, with strange troops overwhelming the building's defenses and unknown weapons bombarding the flickering shields taken from confiscated alien technology.

Martha braced herself against the wall as another blast shook the safe room the injured survivors have taken refuge in while the rest worked to keep back the invaders. For those who have no memory of the Year that Never Was, her hands are surprisingly steady as she first stitched, then bandaged the wound of one of UNIT's surviving soldiers. Although it's been over a year since she walked the Earth, those skills she learned under fire from the Master's soldiers have never truly left her.

"Doctor Jones!"

She looked up to see Lieutenant Roberts in front of her, his eyes wide and terrified in his pale face.

"We've lost contact with the volunteers who were trying to wipe the computers," he whispered, his voice shaking slightly. "What do we do?"

"We need to evacuate," Martha told him curtly as she tied up the bandage and signaling for the woman assisting her to help the patient stand, her mind already starting to run through several contingency plans.

"How?" Roberts asked, following Martha as she strode over to the far wall and started running her hand along it. "We're trap-"

He didn't get a chance to finish. Martha's hand found the hidden panel and the wall slid open to reveal a narrow passage hiding behind the wall.

"This leads to a train that will take you out of the city," she instructed him calmly, meeting his eyes and gesturing at the passage. "Lead everybody through this, then as soon as everybody is through, seal the entrance by pressing the red button."

"Bu-but what about you?" he stammered. "Sh-shouldn't this be your job."

"Until we receive word otherwise, I'm the ranking member of this branch of UNIT, and therefore, I'm the only one who can wipe computers." Martha kept her voice steady and ignored the icy feeling starting to fill her. There's too much data on the UNIT servers to allow them to fall into enemy hands, and even though she technically doesn't have clearance, Toshiko had been able to give Martha backdoor access when she was transferred here. Right before... Martha cut the thought off before it fully formed. Dwelling on dead friends will get her nowhere.

"Barricade the doors after I leave," she continued, grabbing a spare gun and a flashlight and tucking them into her waistband. She doesn't like guns, avoided them if she could, but the stakes are far too high for that now. She has to do what she needs to so that she can protect the small remainder of the UNIT staff stationed here in New York. "Don't let anybody in."

She exited the door, paused, and turned around to give Roberts what she hoped was an encouraging smile. "Good luck. And godspeed," she said to the petrified soldier before turning and walking away. It's not until she heard the sound of the door closing behind her that she breaks into a jog as she carefully made her way to where she could access the servers.

The safe room is four floors below the room where the servers are housed, but there were other ways to access what was needed, including the computer port in Martha's lab, which was only two floors up. One of the lessons that had never fully gone away from her year walking the Earth was the need to know ways to move around unseen in any place she stayed longer than one day. Even with the perception filter, knowing how to escape made the difference between living and dying more than once. The small service tunnel that ran vertically in the wall was both the fastest and the less obvious way to get there.

It's a tight fit, but Martha quickly made her way through and emerged about ten feet from her lab. Hand hovering over her gun, she sprinted the distance and rapidly punched in the code that would open the door. It silently slid open and Martha thanked whatever higher power that might be out there that the invading forces hadn't reached this part of the building yet.

Martha had been transferred to New York to help oversee a top secret project, code-named Project Indigo, as the medical supervisor. Somehow, UNIT had recovered a vortex manipulator and was working to combine it with salvaged Sontaran technology to create a better method of transportation. It hadn't been tested, however, and Martha wasn't about to be the first person to do so under these circumstances.

"I'm so sorry," she muttered, pointing her gun and firing it at the half-assembled chasis. Bits of metal and plastic flew everywhere as she fired again, determined to prevent anybody from reconstructing what had been UNIT's pride and joy.

The damage done, Martha tucked the gun back in her waistband before grabbing the vortex manipulator, strapping it to her wrist and entering in the coordinates needed for her plan to work. As bumpy as the ride was, she'd rather use tech she was familiar with and that she knew worked from tests the previous weeks.

_One last thing,_ she thought to herself, walking over to the computer station and typing in the code that would give her access to the servers. It only took ten seconds to freeze them, and then another thirty to activate the defensive subroutine Jack had told her about. She paused for a moment before entering in the final command, feeling a little nostalgic as she did so. Then, as soon as she pressed the "enter" key, she backed up several feet, drew her gun once more, and proceeded to destroy the computer.

Taking a deep breath to calm herself down, Martha dropped the gun on the floor, kicked it under a table, and exited the room as quietly as she had entered. She walked towards the main stairwell, ignoring the little voice in the corner of her mind telling her that this was insanity, that there was no way she was going to get through her plan alive. Martha ignored that voice, just like she had ignored it during the Year That Never Was and her adventures with the Doctor.

It was normally when that little voice started speaking up that she knew that what she was doing was totally insane and, just maybe, might work.

She had made it up two flights of stairs before she heard the sound of another living creature. Rounding a corner, she came faced to face with helmeted aliens she didn't recognize. Not even waiting for them to point their weapons, she raised her hands and gave them a steady look.

"Take me to your leader," she told them quietly, hoping that the leftover translating effect the TARDIS had given her hadn't suddenly left her. "I'm here to surrender."

- 0 - 0 -

Martha kept her hands at her side as she was marched through the labyrinth of hallways and stairs to the main control room, ignoring the nausea rising in her throat at the bodies of her comrades scattered about like broken dolls. Her escort was largely silent, other than a brief exchange when she first turned herself in, trying to decide whether or not they should kill her and be done with it. Fortunately, they had decided against that idea, which meant her plan still had a chance of succeeding.

"Well, well, what have we here?" a smooth, British-accented voice asked as she was led into the center of the room and shoved forward by one of the aliens. There, surrounded by even more alien troops and dead bodies, stood a tall man dressed in strange black, gold, and green armor that Martha didn't recognize from her travels with the Doctor. His face was pale, accentuated by the stark blackness of his hair, which made his green eyes stand out that much more.

Despite the complete dissimilarities in location and person standing in front of her, Martha couldn't help but flash back to facing the Master aboard _The Valiant_, and it was all she could do to control her breathing and keep herself calm and stop her heart from racing in panic. She could indulge in a panic attack later.

"Answer your king," the man continued quietly when Martha didn't immediately answer him. "Who are you?"

"I'm Doctor Martha Jones," she answered coldly, meeting his eyes and not giving him a figurative inch even though he towered over her. Somehow, announcing that he was here to rule the world had made the situation somehow easier to handle than if he was just another variation on the Master trying to destroy Earth. She had seen the world brought to its knees once. She didn't know if she could handle seeing it happen yet again."Who the hell are you?"

The butt of an alien gun hit her back, but other than a grimace at the sudden pain, Martha didn't move.

"You're a defiant one, aren't you, Doctor Martha Jones," the man observed, walking closer to her. "And yet, you surrendered yourself to my troops." He stopped a foot from where Martha, so that she had to crane her head back in order to keep meeting his eyes. "What do you have planned?"

"Survival, that's all" she told him simply. The easiest way to lie was to make sure that there was enough truth in it, and she had no plans on dying today.

He studied her, his gaze boring into hers. She continued to meet it evenly, doing her best only to think of her friends and family, how worried they were for her, how much she missed them. She didn't know if this man could read thoughts, but she couldn't take that risk. Not when she was so close.

"Very well, then, Doctor Jones," he finally answered in a quiet voice after several long seconds. "If you're so keen on surviving the next few minutes, you'll help me with this little problem." He turned around and gestured at a console that several aliens were clustered around. "It appears that the computers crashed just before you surrendered," he said in a voice that wasn't quite a challenge, but also wasn't an accusation. It was in a strange middle ground between the two, and it made Martha nervous. She clamped down on the feeling as he continued, "I need them restarted."

Martha did her best not to look elated. This was going better than expected in certain regards, and now would just be the perfect time for everything to fall apart. "I'm a medical doctor, not a computer scientist," she snapped at him, unable to help herself from paraphrasing Star Trek.

The man raised a hand to stop the expected blow. "You get me into that computer, Doctor Martha Jones, or you die," he told her, his gaze sharpening. "Now."

Martha glared at him before walking over to the console. The aliens moved away, and it took her a moment to realize it wasn't because they were making room for her. Rather, it was because the man had followed her over.

"You still didn't tell me who you are," Martha commented quietly as she started to try to find the screen she needed, not sure how far she could push her luck.

"My name is no importance to this task," was his curt answer, his breath ghosting over her shoulder.

"Would it help if I said please?" she asked and looked behind her at him, suppressing the urge to shiver. Behind the cool, ambitious look in his eyes, there was something else. Something almost feral in the way he was studying her. For a split second, she found herself missing the straightforward madness of the Master. At least that had been predictable.

At least then she hadn't been truly alone facing down a madman bent on conquest.

Martha turned back to the computer console, trying her best to convey that she was ignoring him instead of doing her best not to let her memories of the Year That Never Was overwhelm her. She wouldn't-couldn't-let the Master eek out a final victory by preventing her from completing her mission.

Several minutes passed while she worked in silence, using every trick she knew to stall until she made her way to the screen that she needed to see if she could get any more information out of him before she put her plan in motion. She could feel the gaze of the man on her, but she ignored it. This was just like being in medical school, she reminded herself, working under pressure from somebody who would take oh so much pleasure in seeing her fail.

"Loki Laufreyson."

"Excuse me?" Martha asked, slightly startled by the man's voice. "Loki? As in the Norse god of mischief and chaos?"

"You wished to know my name, mortal," he answered smugly.

Martha couldn't help but get the impression he expected her to be stunned by this revelation, and to be fair, she was a bit. Of course, she was also the woman who may have been the inspiration for Shakespeare's Dark Lady. She had traveled with the most impossible man she'd ever met to the end of the universe, and walked the Earth alone to tell a story in a mad attempt to save the world and unwrite history. A man claiming he was a Norse god? She could handle that.

That didn't mean she wasn't surprised, but not to the extent he apparently expected.

"As if my day wasn't strange enough," Martha muttered under her breath, more for his benefit than hers as she finally reached the screen that she needed.

"I'm here," she told him, taking a deep breath to steady herself. "I have to give the computer verbal commands, though, so that it knows that a member of UNIT is the one doing this."

"Very well," Loki replied after a pause. He made a brief gesture, and Martha found herself staring down the barrels of various alien guns. "Proceed."

"I love the trust you're placing in me," she said, unable to help herself. She rubbed her hands together in a way that gave her easy and immediate access to the vortex manipulator. She took another deep breath and said three words:

"Colloportus, obliviate, expelliarmus."

Red alarms started flashing and an electronic voice started speaking over deafening sirens. "Unauthorized life forms detected. Unauthorized life forms detected."

The security protocol that Jack had told Martha about was a relatively simple one, designed to be used in an instance of a hostile takeover. Through the access that Tosh had given Martha, it had been simple to add in her own code words in the event she had to be the one to activate it. _Colloportus_ sealed all the entrances and exits to the building. _Oblivate_ activated the remote destruction of the servers. And _expelliarmus_ would take care of any invaders who happened to be trapped inside.

"You!" Loki snarled as lasers started firing, lunging for Martha, but too late. The second the last syllable had left her mouth, she had activated the vortex manipulator to escape, leaving him closing his hands around empty air.

The brief ride was just as violent and bumpy as Martha remembered. She landed on her knees, stomach churching as she caught her breath.

"Freeze!" a voice barked out from behind her. "Hands where we can see them."

Slowly raising her hands, Martha turned around to see two men dressed in black combat gear pointing guns at her, the logo for SHIElD on their chests.

"I'm Doctor Martha Jones of UNIT," she told them slowly. "Or what's left of it."

"Stand down, men," a voice came from behind the soldiers. Not taking their eyes off Martha, they stepped aside to let through a short, ordinary looking man dressed in a suit who she didn't recognize.

"I'm Agent Phil Coulson," he introduced himself when he stopped in front of Martha."We heard what happened from our operatives on the scene, but we weren't aware there were any survivors."

"Some," Martha answered, hoping that Roberts had been able to evacuate everybody from the safe room. "I can give you the coordinates to the rendezvous point where you should be able to find them."

"That would be helpful, Dr. Jones," he replied, holding out his hand for her to shake. "Let's go inside so that we can debrief you and discuss what to do next."


End file.
